Equipping Workers With Literacy
It should dismay you to learn that Los Angeles has the most undereducated workforce of any U.S. metropolitan area.
At a time when every business steps to the beat of advanced information systems, one in every four Los Angeles workers may be functionally illiterate.
Thankfully, the city is launching a long-term effort to change this. The Workforce Literacy Project is not some shot in the dark, but rather a program that builds on the success of the region’s network of community colleges. The schools have been sending teachers into factories and other workplaces for years with excellent results.
For example, when Northrop Grumman Corp. found in the late 1990s that assembly-line workers couldn’t understand upgraded computer instructions for manufacturing parts of F/A-18 fighter planes, the company got a lift from West Los Angeles Community College. It dispatched teachers to hold 1,200 hours of English-language classes for 525 employees at the company’s plant in El Segundo.
The result: Quality improved markedly, and the employees -- now able to qualify for federal certification -- were able to win higher pay.
Tiny Pervo Paint Co. of South Los Angeles also called out for help. Owner Brad De Ruiter found that his longtime workers, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, couldn’t read new labels for the paint cans. This wasn’t a problem when the company was sustained by a single big contract from the state Department of Transportation; every paint can was filled with the same exact mixture.
“It didn’t really matter that they couldn’t read,” De Ruiter says.
But when the company landed new business in San Bernardino and Arizona, it had to produce different labels. So it signed up with West Los Angeles City College to bring teachers to the plant. Employee literacy in English went up. Productivity and profit for the firm followed.
Northrop and Pervo are hardly alone. In recent years, community colleges increasingly have been asked to teach English and to bolster employee reading skills for a Southland workforce that is primarily made up of immigrants or the children of recent immigrants. In the San Fernando Valley, for instance, three community colleges train workers for 15 customer call centers, including for AOL Time Warner Inc.’s cable division.
Yet at present, the colleges cut their own deals in their respective communities. There is no overall, coordinated program for the region.
Thus, Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn’s office decided to organize the Workforce Literacy Program. With help from the USC School of Education, City Hall is in the process of bringing together the community colleges, the Chamber of Commerce, the United Way and the Los Angeles Unified School District to devise a fully integrated program.
But can such a broad-based undertaking wind up as anything more than a bureaucratic committee-fest?
Perhaps it can. LAUSD, for one, already has an adult education program that teaches English and other subjects to 400,000 people at local schools on nights and weekends. The goal for these students is to improve employment prospects.
The Workforce Literacy Program “could make it possible for us to go into the factories and offices to teach,” says LAUSD Board Chairman Jose Huizar. “That would make it much easier on workers who hold two and three jobs” and have little free time.
For businesses, meanwhile, the literacy effort comes at a time when they believe government has otherwise largely abandoned them.
The need is for “something more than simple literacy because workers today are asked to operate machines and information systems that cost almost $1 million apiece,” says Richard Hollingsworth, president of the Gateway Cities Partnership, which encourages economic development in communities such as Downey and Paramount. “They don’t write the manuals for those in sixth-grade English.”
The truth is, the advantage of Southern California’s workforce is its potential. The region has large numbers of willing employees, who now toil long hours for little money, but whose productivity and incomes can grow dramatically if they can expand their education.
Martha de la Torre would attest to that.
She is chief executive and publisher of El Clasificado, a Spanish-language classified-advertising paper with a circulation of 140,000 in the Los Angeles area. But she wanted her employees, who are proficient in Spanish, to learn English.
“Computer instructions are in English,” de la Torre explains. “And, besides, some English-language customers want to place ads in our Spanish paper.”
So she obtained a grant from the state’s Employment Training Program to pay for English lessons for the staff of El Clasificado. Now, the company has new computers on which employees can take orders directly; before, they had to go through a supervisor. Productivity is up, de la Torre reports, and sales have soared 30%.
For California business, it’s a no-brainer: The Three R’s are reading, ‘riting -- and revenue.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan @latimes.com
